FRIENDS has reached out to Canada's Premiers appealing for them to urge Ottawa to close the tax loophole that encourages Canadian advertisers to spend on foreign online platforms, 80% of which ($4.4 billion per year) travels down a tax-free express lane straight to Google and Facebook in the US.

The Fairplay Coalition, including the media unions Unifor, ACTRA, IATSE, and the Director’s Guild, says they want a stop to the job-killing drain of $500 million annually from the Canadian movie and TV industry.

Giant American companies such as Google, Facebook, YouTube and many others are sucking the lifeblood out of Canada’s media economy – threatening the very future of our local TV, newspapers and radio stations – even hurting the CBC. A loophole in Canada’s tax system is actually making this happen.

Columnist says the preservation and protection of the French language and identity on this continent are so deeply ingrained in every francophone that nothing as petty as a technology revolution can deter its instincts.

At a recent Parliamentary hearing, Rob Malcolmson, a senior executive at Bell Canada Enterprises Inc., suggested Canada should use its ongoing NAFTA renegotiation talks to push for the criminalization of copyright infringement and the formation of a website blocking system aimed at the most egregious online pirates.

FRIENDS spokesperson says that as alarm bells ring across the country about the troubled state of Canadian media and local news, policy-makers have overlooked a surprisingly obvious and accessible fix.

In a letter sent to federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau, Quebec's Finance Minister signalled his intention to go where Ottawa won’t and apply the Quebec sales tax to services provided by Netflix and other firms doing business in Quebec without actually having retail outlets here.

"Their investment decisions are likely to focus increasingly on a narrow range of very expensive, very high-end content," Tony Hall says about streaming giants and warns of a $660 million spending hole.

The president of Canadian Media Research says that if a “Netflix tax” is off the table, then Canada needs a Mélanie Joly tax, equivalent to a TV/internet licence fee, with the revenue used to fund a commercial-free CBC, private TV production and other media.

Columnist says the federal government’s stubbornness not to make Canadians pay the GST on their Netflix subscription is hindering any progress on the much greater problem of GST collection by foreign digital service companies.